A Day at the Sea

Sunday mornings were kept aside to visit the beach — that was the family’s weekly picnic. The men wore short shorts looking unfashionable, fat; hopping on the boiling sand barefoot, chappals in hand. The women took time to have their pick from the opaque salwars, to make inconspicuous bathing suits.

Later, they claimed they were late because they were making coffee, filling up two Eagle flasks for the family.

I led the family platoon – an unabashed little corporal – even though I was not a man yet; a mere boy of five. In an Awara hat, a maternal uncle had bought from the Mandir market, after the film was a hit. I stole it under his affectionate gaze, matching it with an un-ironed cotton shirt and pants, and a pair of Bata chappals grandfather bought me before the Puja.

On that day, it was a fierce summer sun. The sand was hot.

Keeping Deven Dutta’s clinic on our left and the Puri Hotel on the right, we marched to arrive at an iron gate leading to a cement path. The path led to the sea. I opened the gate in a hurry and raced down the path toward the sea, ignoring the furious warnings of my grandfather.

Expecting a visual of blue water, and the sound of its incessant roar, and the foamy end of the sea jingling briskly on the beach. A burning sky getting wet in the mercurial water. And the wet sand thickly strewn with seashells patterned in accord with a child’s whim.

Nothing. There was nothing.

I looked back at my grandfather and cried, “Dadu, Dadu, there is no sea!”

Grandfather, panting far behind, could not hear what I had said.

He shouted back, “What?”

A minute later he appeared, towering over me, still panting, still looking at the vast stretch of sand that laid before him, like a desert — mile after mile, without a hint of water or salt, without fish, without a school or the skeletons of whales. He nodded sadly.

“Really! No sea. Should we head back to our quarter then? No chance we could swim today in the sea.”

That night we came back to Bengal travelling by the Puri Express. A night made of dim station lights. A moody engine hissing, gulping coal, pulling six maroon bogeys leisurely across the furious Brahmani.

I have never gone back to Puri.

My grandfather, who retired as the station superintendent, died in Bengal within a year of his retirement. Neither he nor my grandmother, who died in Pune, in 1998. Two maternal uncles, one in Pune, one in Kolkata, are still alive. They are not keeping well. My mother and my two aunts, knotted sullenly to their families and tired with life, have no wish to return to the house of their girlhood.

Who knows who is living there? Who climbs the guava tree that stands in the courtyard? Is that house still erect or has it been pulled down to make a station-facing mall?

In a bid to return to the summers of my childhood, every year I browse the train timetable and look at the map to find the blue of the Bay of Bengal on the map at the rim of the town of Puri. Yet I am not sure if there is still a sea.

(The poem was first published in Madras Courier: https://madrascourier.com/art-and-poetry/a-day-at-the-sea/)